(TNS) – Who needs an education if you have AI? This is the question of many young students asking themselves as they stand in the precipice of an exciting new era which will completely reshape the way they are taught and what they need to learn.
The age of artificial intelligence, robots and fries in the brain is upon us. However, many schools, especially in the Pennsylvania which love tradition, seem to be stuck in the 20th century, determined to try to prevent students from embracing everything that AI has to offer to make learning both faster and easier.
While Jesse Waters, former director of The Bowers Writers House at Elizabethtown College, recently asked a group of high school students, what is the importance of the struggle for education? Is human intellect formed not only by compilations of facts and figures, he asked, but during working hours, perspiration and tears that he had to reach them?
Waters hired high school and college students participating in a summer internship program with Pennlive and the Harrisburg World Affairs Council on an appropriate use of AI in education. Students are already impregnated with AI and use it regularly, whether to calculate the distance between the land in Mars, work an algebraic equation or to trace the path closest to a pizza. These are digital natives who have never lived without a keyboard or mobile phone.
And the question they debated with Waters is what teachers and students across the country reflect: if knowledge comes to the click of a keyboard or simply ask Siri, has it become too easy and cheap to be really precious?
Should children be forced to fight by equations lines to find the value of X, or is it just a waste of time when the AI can tell us in two seconds?
The kind of easy access to knowledge that students have today is not what we appreciated as a education. But today's young people are smarter than ever. They can obtain answers to complex equations in seconds by simply asking Siri, and they can transform documents in the long term in a few minutes, if they know what to ask for chatgpt.
Many schools have trouble dealing with the new reality that AI has triggered. Hoping to stem tsunami on the horizon, some have established strict rules at the time and the way students can use AI. Some prohibit them from using AI to write articles; Others allow its use but only for the first or last drafts. But we are indeed on the border of a brand new learning universe where the rules are rewritten every day to keep up with the rate of accelerating the speed of the learning of artificial intelligence brings.
In the final analysis, educators like Waters know that they will have to accept the reality of the revolutionary IA impact on education AI. And it's not on the horizon, it's here.
There are already fries that can be planted in a person's brain to help overcome disabilities and improve cognitive capacities. It is not difficult to imagine one day being able to buy knowledge tokens that erase the need for years of training and special education. What does this mean for a university degree that costs $ 200,000 to reach?
Today, young people know that they are the beneficiaries of AI genius, and the challenge to which the educators are confronted is to find the right balance by adopting everything that is good while keeping its abuse and abuse.
One thing is clear, schools trying to apply a total AI ban are doomed to failure. And a lot Teachers are poorly equipped to treat With cataclysmic changes, AI is unleashed in their classrooms.
Teachers must be better trained at AI so that they can better protect their students, many of whom are already leagues to come in understanding and use it.
Above all, educators will have to teach these young superpowers what AI cannot – that an education is not only the acquisition of knowledge, but wisdom, ethics and restraint to use it properly.
Joyce M. Davis is the editor in terms of Pennlive awareness and opinion. Follow her on Facebook, Bluesky @ joycemdavis.bsky.social, and on Twitter @byjoyedavis.
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